Thunderhawk blasts man-camps

With her daughter Marcella Gilbert, Madonna Thunderhawk holds Best Documentary Feature trophy, presented for their independent movie “Warrior Women,” made in Lakota Territory about the legacy of the Red Power movement. (Photo by Talli Nauman)

RAPID CITY – The cast and crew of the movie “Warrior Women” used their most recent award for Best Documentary Feature — at the 11th Annual Black Hills Film Festival on Feb. 20 — as an occasion to announce grassroots activities to protect Lakota and other communities from the proposed construction of the Keystone XL tar-sands crude oil pipeline.
“Warrior Women” cast members Madonna Thunderhawk and her daughter Marcella Gilbert, on stage here at their film showing, said they banded together with other grandmothers, recently convincing the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe to declare a state of emergency over the pipeline construction man-camps slated on four locations near Indian reservations in South Dakota.
“We are trying to prepare our communities for the effects of man-camps 50 and 60 miles from the reservation,” Gilbert said. Increases in sex trafficking and other violence against women and girls have been linked to oil industry man-camps in North Dakota.
“Warrior Women,” indigenously co-directed and co-produced by Beth Castle and Christina D. King, was conceived as a gateway to an ongoing community organizing scheme, which they describe as “an innovative collaboration of scholarship, media, and activism that seeks to provide a forum for the Warrior Women of the Red Power Movement and current indigenous activists to tell their stories in their own words for the benefit of future generations.”
It all started when Castle, who is descended from the Pekowi band of the Shawnee in Ohio and has a PhD from Cambridge University in England, wrote her book Women Were the Backbone, Men Were the Jawbone: Native Women’s Activism in the Red Power Movement.
Based on research for the book, this 64-minute retrospective follows Thunderhawk family members’ experience in the Red Power movement from the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco to the Oceti Sakowin resistance at the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016.
It smashes chauvinistic views of history to reveal how women and their children were vital to success in the human and civil rights struggles of the late 20th Century.
No sooner was the picture premiered than did Castle establish the Water Protectors Oral History Project, inviting participants in the international indigenous-led pipeline standoff to participate. In its two years to date, the effort has gathered some 60 videos for free educational distribution online at waterprotectorscommunity.org/
Meanwhile, the movie has garnered not only the Black Hills Film Festival Award but also Best Documentary Feature at the 2018 San Francisco American Indian Film Festival; Best Documentary at the 2018 L.A. Skins Fest; Best Documentary Feature at the 2019 22nd Annual Cine las Americas International Film Festival in Austin, Texas; Best Documentary Short of 2019 at The Roxbury International Film Festival in Massachusetts; Best Documentary of 2019 at the 14th Vancouver International Women in Film Festival; and the Audience Award at the 2019 Annual Black Star Film Festival in Philadelphia.
Black Hills Film Festival Co-Founder Chris VanNess said the screening committee chose to invite “Warrior Women” to the competition partly because of the way the filmmakers are utilizing the production for community organizing.
However, the award criteria does not include that consideration, she told the Native Sun News Today. “We pick the best films with the best stories, films that move you,” she said.
The criteria include direction, story, acting, sound, and editing. A panel of judges picks the top three productions and sends them “to a professional from the industry” to make the final decisions, VanNess said.
“Our South Dakota films have to stand up with all the rest of them, so when they win, they really win,” she said.
As part of their organizing, the cast and crew promoted a South Dakota women’s O’maka Tokatakiya — Future Generations Ride, an outgrowth of the former Bigfoot Ride that annually attracts horseback riders to honor ancestors lost in the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee and pray for the future generations.
Thunderhawk and other participants in the ride revived the 1970s Women of All Red Nations (WARN) t-shirt design and wore it in a symbolic border patrol along the southeastern boundary of the Cheyenne River Reservation “to send a clear message to KXL and its incoming man camps: ‘you are not welcome on our homelands’.”
The event is recorded at the blog of Warrior Women Project Community Media, the latest outgrowth of the movie production and project.
The team markets movie memorabilia, including the t-shirts, hats, lotion, and soap, to help support community organizing through purchases online and at screening events.